Tuesday, October 21




I love Robert Anton Wilson, It's such a shame that a mind as his has passed into the incomprehensible ether. He co-authored the Illuminatus Trilogy and helped create some of my favorite philosophies and ideals. From Discordianism, to The Church Of The Subgenius and the concept of Fnords. He wrote a million brilliant books and helped found the Maybe Logic Academy, under which I studied two years ago.

I've been hunting down this thought by him for a while and just found it, I thought I would share.

"I don't believe anything, but I have many suspicions.

I strongly suspect that a world "external to," or at least independent of, my senses exists in some sense.

I also suspect that this world shows signs of intelligent design, and I suspect that such intelligence acts via feedback from all parts to all parts and without centralized sovereignity, like Internet; and that it does not function hierarchically, in the style an Oriental despotism, an American corporation or Christian theology..

I somewhat suspect that Theism and Atheism both fail to account for such decentralized intelligencce, rich in circular-causal feedback.

I more-than-half suspect that all "good" writing, or all prose and poetry that one wants to read more than once, proceeds from a kind of "alteration in consciousness," i.e. a kind of controlled schizophrenia. [Don't become alarmed -- I think good acting comes from the same place.]

I sometimes suspect that what Blake called Poetic Imagination expresses this exact thought in the language of his age, and that visits by"angels" and "gods" states it an even more archaic argot.

These suspicions have grown over 72 years, but as a rather slow and stupid fellow I do not have the chutzpah to proclaim any of them as certitudes. Give me another 72 years and maybe I'll arrive at firmer conclusions."

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